Stories of Erskine Caldwell

by Erskine Caldwell

  Laura was waiting for us on the front porch. She jumped up and ran to meet us when we went up the steps.

  “Where have you been all this time — did something happen?” she asked.

  We told her about the bee that had stung Drusilla.

  “But it doesn’t hurt now,” Drusilla said.

  I went across the porch to the swing and waited until they came.

  “I got back from town so late that I decided to wait here for you,” Laura explained. “But if I had known you were going to stay this late I would have come down to the orchard and walked home with you.”

  I sat down for a few minutes and then got up to go home. Laura went to the gate with me.

  “I’m sorry I ran away like I did this afternoon and made you entertain Drue all day — but she is leaving in the morning and you can come back soon, Bob.”

  “Is she going home tomorrow?” I asked quickly. “I’d better tell her good-by, then.”

  I ran back to the porch where we had left Drusilla in the swing, but she had gone into the house. I walked back to Laura and asked her to tell Drusilla that I went to tell her good-by but that she had left the porch.

  “Good night, Bob,” Laura said, squeezing my hand.

  I opened the gate and went out.

  “Good night,” I said.

  Laura waited several minutes at the gate while I ran down the road towards home. I forgot that I had not kissed her until I had gone into the house.

  When I went upstairs to my room I was angry with Laura for having Drusilla down to visit her, and I was just a little angry with Drusilla for making me like her more than I did Laura. I tried not to think about it very much, but I knew I liked Drusilla more than I loved Laura.

  As soon as I could find the ink bottle I began writing a letter.

  Dearest Drusilla: I am coming to Baltimore to look for a job and I want to see you as soon as I get there, I know I’ll like to live there because I . . .

  I stopped and wondered how I could say everything I wanted to in a letter.

  (First published in American Earth)

  Handy

  NOBODY KNEW WHERE Handy came from, and nobody knew where he would go if he left, but if he had not killed Grandpa Price, he could have stayed another ten years or more.

  Grandpa Price was old, and he was peevish, and he did nothing but fuss and find fault all day long. If he had been let alone, he would not have lived much longer, anyway.

  But Handy hit Grandpa Price with a windlass, and the old man died that night. Handy had to pack up the little that belonged to him and get ready to go somewhere else to live.

  “You ought to have had better sense,” Harry Munford told him.

  “It wasn’t sense that had to do with it,” Handy said.

  “Just the same, it wasn’t a good thing to do.”

  “A man oughtn’t be an out-and-out troublemaker,” Handy said. “People who spend their lives building things don’t have time to find fault with others.”

  “Even so,” Harry said, “you shouldn’t have done what you did to Grandpa Price.”

  A whole day could be spent counting up the downright troublemaking things Grandpa Price had said and done during the past ten or fifteen years. When he ran out of the ordinary things to find fault with, such as not enough gravy on the chicken or too much sweetening in the custard, he would go around quarreling about the time of day it happened to be. Sometimes when it was morning, he would say it ought to be afternoon, and when it was noon, he would say it ought to be dawn, and then rant and rave if anybody said noon was as good as anything else for it to be. Only a few days before he died, he got after Harry because the chimney might not be in plumb. That made Harry so mad he almost lost his head. “What if it ain’t?” he shouted at the old man. “Because if it ain’t, it ought to be,” Grandpa Price said. Harry was so mad by then that he went for a plumb line and dropped it on the chimney. The chimney was only an eighth of an inch out of plumb. “That ought to make you shut your mouth from now on!” Harry shouted at him. “I won’t shut my mouth, because the chimney is out of plumb and you know it. It ought to be torn down and built up again right,” Grandpa Price said. “Over my dead body,” Harry told him. Grandpa Price fussed about the chimney being out of plumb all the rest of the day, and even through supper until he went to bed that night. He called Harry and all the Munfords lazy, good for nothing, and slipshod. He followed Harry around the place the next day saying anybody who would take up for an out-of-plumb chimney was not a good citizen.

  “The more I think about it, Handy, the more I think you shouldn’t have done it,” Harry said. “Any number of times I’ve felt like picking up a brick or a crowbar and doing the thing myself, but a man can’t go around the world hitting old men like that, no matter how provoked he is. The law’s against it.”

  “I just couldn’t stand it no longer, Mr. Harry,” Handy said. “I’m sorry about it now, but it just couldn’t be helped at the time.”

  Handy had lived there ten or twelve years. When he walked into the front yard for the first time, it was in the middle of the cotton-picking season. He came in and said he was looking for something to do. It was at a time when Harry needed cotton pickers if he ever needed them. He was glad to see anybody who came up and said he wanted a job. Harry was all ready to hire Handy. He told Handy he was paying sixty cents a hundred in the fields.

  Handy shook his head as though he knew exactly what he wanted. Cotton picking was not it. “No sirree, bob. I don’t pick no cotton,” Handy said. “I haven’t got any need for anybody else these days,” Harry told him. “The cotton is falling on the ground, going to waste faster every day, and that’s all I’m concerned about now.” “You always got need for something new, or something made of something old.” “What do you mean?” “I make things,” Handy said. “I just take what’s thrown away and make it useful. Sometimes I like to make a thing just because it’s pretty, though.”

  He picked up a stick of wood about a foot long and two or three inches thick. Nobody paid much attention to what he was doing, and Harry was sizing him up to be a tramp. He asked Handy if he had ever worked in the fields, and Handy said he had not. He asked him if he had worked on the river steamers, and Handy said, No. In the cotton mills. Not ever. Railroads. No. Harry shook his head. He put Handy down a tramp. Handy scraped the wood with the knife blade and handed it to Harry. It was the smoothest-whittled wooden spoon anybody had ever seen. It looked as if it had been sandpapered and polished with soapstone. It had taken Handy only the length of time he was standing there to do it, too. Harry turned the spoon over and over in his hands, felt of it, and smiled at Handy. Anybody who could do a thing like that deserved a better jackknife than Handy had. Harry took his own out of his pocket and gave it to him.

  Nobody said anything more to him about picking cotton in the fields. Handy walked around the yard looking at things for a while, and then he went around to the back of the house and looked inside the barn, the woodshed, the smokehouse, and the chicken run. He looked in all the hen nests, and then he began carving nest eggs out of some blocks of wood he found in the barn. They were smooth and brown, and the laying hens liked them better than any other kind.

  After he had made six or eight nest eggs, he found something else to do. He never asked Harry or anybody if it was all right for him to do a thing, or if they wanted something made; he just went ahead and made whatever he felt like doing. The chairs Handy made were the most comfortable in the house, the plowstocks were the strongest on the farm, and the weather vanes were the prettiest in the country.

  “The trouble with Grandpa Price, he wasn’t like me and you, Handy,” Harry said. “The reason me and you are alike is that I crave to get things growing in the fields, and you to make things with your hands. Grandpa Price didn’t have that feeling in him. All he wanted was to find fault with what other people grow or make.”

  Handy was sad and dejected. He knew it would take him a long time to find another place where t
he people would let him stay and make things. He would be able to stop along the road now and then, of course, and make a chicken coop for somebody or build a pigpen; but as soon as he finished it, they would give him a leftover meal or a pair of old pants and tell him to go on away. He knew all about the trouble he was going to have finding somebody who would let him stay and just make things. Some of them would offer him a job plowing; in the fields, or working on a river steamer. “I want to make things out of pieces of wood,” Handy said. “I want to build things with my fingers.” The people were going to back away from him; they would shut the door in his face. He could not sit still. His hands began to tremble.

  “What’s the matter, Handy?” Harry asked him. “What makes you shake like that? Don’t let what happened to Grandpa Price untie you.”

  “It’s not that, it’s something else.”

  “What else?”

  “I’m going to find it hard not having a place to live where I can make things.”

  “I hate like everything to see you go,” Harry said. “Somehow or other it don’t seem right at all.” It hurt him so much to think about Handy’s leaving that he tried not to look at him. “But,” he said, “the sheriff will make it hard for me if I fail to tell him what happened.” It was already the day after Grandpa Price had died, and the sheriff had to be told about it before Grandpa Price could be buried in the cemetery. “But I don’t want to do it, just the same,” Harry said sadly. “It means driving you off, Handy, and I’d drive you off a dozen times before I’d let the sheriff find you here when he comes.”

  It hurt Harry so much to think about it he could not sit there and look at Handy. He got up and walked away by himself.

  When he came back, Handy was not there. But presently he saw Handy’s head bobbing up and down behind the barn fence, and he was relieved. After a while he went into the house to change into clean overalls and shirt. He had to change before he could go into town, anyway. There was nothing to stop him from taking as much time as he wanted, though. He looked at two or three pairs of overalls before deciding which to put on. He liked to have a person like Handy around, because Handy was always making something, or getting ready to make something. That was what he liked about Handy. He was like the children when they came home from school, or on holidays. They were busy at something, play or work, every minute they were awake. He was afraid, though, that when they grew up they would get to be like Grandpa Price, that they would spend their time finding fault instead of making things.

  When Harry finally came out into the yard, it was late in the afternoon.

  “I don’t like to go to town at this time of the day,” he said, looking toward the barn where Handy was, up at the sky, and back again toward the barn. “It would mean coming back long after dark.”

  Harry walked around the house, to the garden several times, and finally toward the barnyard. He wondered more and more all the time what Handy was spending so much time down there for. Several times he had seen Handy come to the barn door, throw some trash and shavings outside, and then disappear again.

  It grew dark soon, and he did not see Handy again until the next morning. Handy was at the table eating breakfast when Harry came in and sat down.

  “What’s this?” Harry asked, standing up again suddenly.

  “A little present for Grandpa Price,” Handy said.

  “But Grandpa Price is dead —”

  “I only made it to hang around his neck in the grave,” Handy said. “I always wanted to make something for him, but I thought he’d find so much fault with it if he was alive that I went ahead and made it all wrong just to please him.”

  It was a wooden chain about two feet long, each link about the size of a fingernail, and each one a different object. Handy had carved it from beginning to end since the afternoon before, sitting up all night to finish it.

  “If Grandpa Price was alive, he’d be so tickled to get it he wouldn’t want to find any fault with it, Handy. As it is, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a finer-looking present.”

  Harry sat down and picked up the chain to look at it more closely. The first link he looked at was a miniature chair with three legs shorter than the fourth one.

  “I didn’t think anybody but me remembered about that time when Grandpa Price quarreled so much about one of the chairs having one leg shorter than the others. I said one leg was shorter. Grandpa Price said three were short and one was long. Up to that time, that was about the biggest quarrel me and him ever had, wasn’t it, Handy?”

  Handy nodded.

  Harry bent over to see what some of the other objects were. One was carved to look like a piece of the sky with the sun and stars shining at the same time. Another was a picture in a frame that looked upside down no matter which way it was turned.

  Handy pushed back his chair and got up.

  “This is too fine a thing to put in a grave, Handy,” Harry said. “It would be a sin to bury a thing like this in the ground where nobody could ever see it again.”

  “I made it for a present to hang around Grandpa Price’s neck,” Handy said. “That’s why I made it.”

  “Well,” Harry said, shaking his head, “that being the case — I guess you’ve got the right to say — But it does seem a shame —”

  Handy went out through the kitchen, down the steps, and across the yard to the barn. As soon as he got inside the barn door, he fired the shotgun.

  Harry jumped to his feet, carrying the chain for Grandpa Price’s neck with him.

  “What did Handy shoot for?” he said.

  He looked out the window for a minute, then he went down to the barn.

  When he came back, he was slow about it. He looked sad, but there was another look on his face at the same time. One moment he felt so good he had to grin about it. “Handy won’t have to go now, after all.” He grinned all over his face. “If Handy had stayed alive, I’d never have seen him again,” he said to himself. He walked up on the porch and began looking at the chain again, picking out a link here and a link there to stare at and feel with his fingers.

  “Grandpa Price can be buried in the cemetery if he wants to,” he said, aloud, “but Handy is going to be buried right here in the back yard.”

  He felt the chain with all the fingers of both hands and held it up to gaze at in the sunlight.

  “I want to have him around,” he said.

  (First published in the New Republic)

  An Autumn Courtship

  AMOS WILLIAMS HAD been carrying a jug of his last year’s cider over to Esther Tibbetts’s every Sunday night for two months or more and he thought it was about time for something to happen. Amos had been trying all summer to marry Esther, but Esther owned a good farm and a fine set of buildings and she thought she was very well off just as she was. Every Sunday night Esther seemed to be ready to say she would marry Amos, but by that time the cider was all gone and he had to go away and wait for another week to pass before he could try again.

  When he went back to work at the skewer mill Monday morning, the other men wanted to know if anything had happened the night before. Everybody in the mill knew that Amos was trying his hardest to marry Esther before winter and cold weather came. Amos had begun taking Esther a jug of cider because one of the men there had said that if a woman drank enough hard cider she would marry anybody.

  “What did Esther say last night, Amos?” one of the men asked him, winking at the others. “Did she say she would get married to you?”

  Amos said nothing for a few minutes. The mill was turning out candy sticks for all-day suckers this week because there was a big stock of meat skewers on hand and a large order for candy sticks had been received over the week end. Amos picked up a wrench and adjusted the turning machine on his bench while everybody stood around waiting to hear about Esther.

  “The cider gave out too quick, I guess,” he said. “I thought for a while she was going to say she would get married, but I guess there wasn’t enough cider.”

 
; “What you should do, Amos,” another of the men said seriously, “is to take two jugs of cider with you next Sunday night. When I was courting my wife, I couldn’t do a thing with her until I began taking two jugs with me when I went to see her. You should take two jugs of cider, Amos. That will make things happen, all right.”

  “I’ll have to do something about it,” Amos said. “My cider barrel is getting low. I’ve only got five or six gallons left in it now. And winter is coming on, too. If Esther don’t marry me pretty soon, I’ll have to buy some new blankets.”

  “You take Esther two jugs next Sunday night, Amos, and if all that cider won’t make something happen for you I’ll give you five gallons out of my own barrel.”

  Amos pulled the belt on his machine and went to work turning candy sticks. He was getting uneasy now that winter was coming. He had planned to marry Esther before it began to be cold at night so he would not have to buy any new blankets. His sister had taken all his quilts when she was married that past spring and now he could not get them away from her. Esther had a lot of quilts and if he could marry her they would use hers that winter. Everything would work out just fine if Esther would only say she would marry him. He would live in Esther’s house because it was a mile closer to the skewer-mill than his own, and he would not have to walk so far when he went to work.

  By the end of the week Amos was desperate. Since Tuesday there had been a heavy frost every night and the only bed covering he had was the old yellow quilt his sister said she would not have. It would have been a foolish waste of money to go to the store and buy two or three sets of blankets, considering the fact that Esther had dozens and dozens of quilts which they would use if she would only marry him before winter and cold weather came.